Social is a far cry from the tatty pub it replaced. Despite some near-cliché hip elements—yet another Hemingway drinking quote on the wall—this 118-seat dinner destination surprises with sophisticated cooking behind a menu deep with enticing dishes. When pressed for a category, Jeffrey Boullt, the executive chef who has lived and worked in several states, settles for Progressive American with Southern influences.

Event Calendars

O.C. abounds with restaurants eager to pamper couples looking for a special night out. Katherine Nguyen offers seven suggestions for date-night destinations, from casual Kettlebar to sumptuous Studio at the Montage.

More Life in O.C.

Just across the freeway from downtown San Juan Capistrano, Marbella Plaza offers top-notch restaurants and an upscale boutique, each with a distinct style and vibe, away from the hustle and bustle of the historic district.

All posts by Martin J. Smith

Fullerton’s Gary Mathis builds his saddles using custom trees (frames), then works the Grade-A hides with hand tools, creates the silver conchos, and cuts and stitches the horn covering from a single piece of leather. Q: Who buys a $12,000 saddle? A: Somebody who rides for hours at a time, not somebody who spends a […]

There are no shortcuts along the road to excellence

I greet Gary Mathis of Gary’s Custom Saddlery in Fullerton, and my hand disappears into his like a car entering a tunnel. His grip is as epic as his handlebar mustache. Still, I watched those same hands move like hummingbirds around the various workbench projects in his garage, where for decades he has handcrafted custom saddles, exotic-leather belts, and the kind of elaborate silver buckles prized by Texas ranchers and country music legends.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who better embodies the whole Orange County melting-pot-zeitgeist thing than the much-betatted, charmingly profane culinary entrepreneur Roy Choi, who arrived in the U.S. with his South Korean parents when he was 2, struggled, assimilated, got rich, got crazy, and then finally discovered his true purpose and changed the world. His […]

Which local lawbreakers need to find a new line of work?

How Not to Impress a Lady, Part I A 20-year-old Temecula man who hacked the computers of Miss Teen USA contestants and more than 100 other women, then secretly took nude photos of them and extorted some into undressing during video chats, was sentenced in March at the Santa Ana courthouse to 18 months in […]

The porous divide between nature and civilization in Orange County

A coyote sauntered past the front bumper of my car as I was pulling into traffic—not unheard of, perhaps, but at the time I was leaving a parking garage in L.A., just a block from the civic center of the most populous city in the American West. At the time, I had a strange, disoriented […]

Why Will Ferrell, Steve Martin, John Stamos and others think kindly about their Wonder Years in O.C.

All of us are shaped by childhood moments, good and bad, that eventually make us who we are. But when asked, most of us remember the Mayberry moments: events that made us happy, people who made us feel safe and treasured, places we cherished. Would I have become a fisherman without having spent memorable mornings […]

A criminal history of O.C.’s most shocking mysteries, felons, and fiends

I spent my first week in O.C. on a friend’s couch in an apartment on Santa Ana’s 17th Street. It was October 1985. That same week, on that same street, a Palestinian-American antidiscrimination activist named Alex Odeh opened the door of his office and set off a bomb. Odeh died in the explosion, which the […]

Call me maudlin, or creepy, but I just can’t bring myself to delete them

I scroll through the nearly 1,300 names in my smartphone’s contact list around this time each year, with an eye toward editing. That’s when I’m haunted by the dead. At present, there are 15 friends, colleagues, and kin who have passed from this life to whatever waits beyond. Seeing their names always gives me pause—a […]

My O.C.: A Long, Sudden Distance

My grandmother’s fifteen minutes of fame came rather late. As heat records were broken across Southern California on Sept. 27, 2010, she failed to return from a doctor’s appointment in Newport Beach. Her photo was flashed on every local TV news broadcast that night. The temperature was 110-plus. In her car were her toy poodle, […]

Commemorating 40 years as ”The Magazine of Orange County”

The opening and closing scenes of the 1994 Robert Zemekis film “Forrest Gump” revolve around a single white feather—OK, a computer-generated feather—drifting on currents of air before alighting on the foot of Tom Hanks’ title character. The director used it as a metaphor for what co-star Gary Sinise later summarized as: “Destiny is a crapshoot.” As […]